I am currently watching Ghosts of Mars, with Ice Cube. Basically, it is a bad movie, a guilty pleasure, a bald faced excuse for lots of scary costumes, fighting, gunplay, explosions and such but, outside of the guns and the zombies it’s not an entirely unreasonable view of what Mars might look like a few decades into the colonization process, with the heavy metal trains linking the central colony with the outlying mines.

It’s not like The Martian, or anything like that, but it’s not much worse than Total Recall, as far as believability. Of course, there’s still a few minutes to go and they could still blow that, because Total Recall, imho, is definitely in my top 5 movies in the category of “pretty good until they totally blew it with a totally ridiculous final scene.”

Mars movies. Eventually there will be more of them than there are Westerns even, because they will continue to make them. As colonization gets closer, there will be many serious ones, that try to look at the scientific problems and difficulties realistically, but there’s a limited market for that kind of that, so Hollywood will continue to crank out the adventures. Then, after the colonization begins, there will be documentaries, and personal dramas, and maybe even the occasional rom-com set on Mars, and they will keep pace with the actual development, sometimes preceding it and predicting new technology , as Star Trek has done.

Some day, a film set on Mars will be no more unusual than a film set in New York City.

(O.K., it’s over. Not bad at all. As long as you’re not fastidious about your film choices, and enjoy lots of death and zombies and shit, it’s worth watching.)